A Pointless Exercise

Marc Ambinder reports:

Inexperience and Unelectability it is.

The Clinton campaign has settled on its final argument against Barack Obama, and is using two new national polls to kick start an aggressive campaign in the national media designed to raise questions about his competence and experience.

In a variety of conference calls over the next few days, in surrogate appearances, and in memos distributed to reporters, the campaign will directly challenge Obama on points of his resume, on past statements of his, on the details of his current policy plans, and on his campaign's pushback that it is Clinton who is not electable. By significant margins, Democrats believe that Clinton is the most electable Democrat and that she will win the nomination, and that she has the requisite experience to be president.

The Clinton campaign wants to spread the idea that Obama would be crushed in a general election by a Republican nominee who is more experienced and more glib than he is. They're prepared to question his credentials from Obama's right and left, pointing today, for example, to a 1996 report that he favored registering hand guns.

Campaign aides have said that Obama's support for retroactivity in drug sentences would kill him with tough-on-crime white independents. . . .

And though the Clinton campaign later disassociated itself from his remarks, Clinton's New Hampshire campaign Chair, Billy Shaheen, suggested that Obama's admitted drug use as a youth could be a liability in the general election.

A number of people seem to think this is a pretty compelling argument against Obama. For example, Taylor Marsh--after criticizing Shaheen's remark--writes:

That said, who opened this door? Obama talked about using cocaine and did so openly and honestly. This wasn't an oppo dump. He served it up to inoculate himself, getting in front of it. Good for him.

However, do you think for a second Republicans won't use it if Obama wins the nomination?

Reality check. Right now Obama's in the love zone; the critique free space of media euphoria. Do you think this will last come the general election? Have I.Q.s dropped significantly since 2004? In the euphoria of the 2006 Democratic juggernaut do people not remember what Republicans are capable of doing behind the scenes?

Get a grip.

Imagine Obama's answer to banning handguns when put on the wingnut spit of right-wing radio, Fox "News," Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et al. Think of all those Republican front groups and what they'll do when they get a hold of this information. The illegal driver's license nugget will be another taste treat for the right-wing xenophobes. John Edwards knows how the general election works and dodged that bullet in the debate. And the "values" coalition will run amok over the cocaine revelation, regardless of whether some of us believe honesty is the best policy, especially if you're of a generation who has used recreational drugs, myself included. But do you believe Republicans won't serve it up in the general?

In my humble opinion, this is exactly the wrong way to approach the electability issue. When it comes to launching attacks in the general election, particularly on issues of policy, the Republican party does not feel even the slightest bit constrained by the factual record. By May of 2004, a full six months before the general election, the Bush/Cheney campaign (not counting its surrogates) had already pelted John Kerry with almost 50,000 negative ads. Among other things, these ads claimed that Kerry would repeal all of the Bush tax cuts, that he would raise taxes by $900 billion, that he would raise the gas tax by 50 cents per gallon, and that he opposed wiretapping terrorists. What do all these claims have in common? You guessed it; they were completely made up.

It only got worse as the campaign dragged on. And that's not even counting the ads put out by the RNC, the Swift Boat Veterans, and other "independent" groups--nearly all of which were chocked full of demonstrable lies.

It's a pointless exercise to try to anticipate what past statements or other assorted trivia the Republicans will seize upon in the general election. If they don't find something to their liking during their oppo research, they'll just make stuff up. No Democratic candidate is more electable than any other in this regard.